How to Reduce the Economy’s Impact on Your Small Scale Business

As a Nigerian entrepreneur running a small scale business, the economy gets rocky sometimes and this may have such a bad effect on your business.

It is important as a business owner to develop strategies that protect your business from being deeply impacted by unfortunate events that may get the economy rocky. This should be done early because the worse an economy gets, the more difficult it becomes to save your business from going down too.

It can be scary, especially because unlike the big companies with enough funding, it may difficult for your small scale business to recover from an economically turbulent time.

We’ve written this to give you a few ideas on how to reduce the impact of a bad economy on your small scale business:

Go Harder on Marketing

When times are bad, during an economic downtime or a recession, your utmost priority should be making sure that your customers are constantly thinking about you. This means that you should go even harder on marketing.

During an economic downtime, everyone is stressed and wrapped around themselves, so it might be difficult for businesses to get remembered because of all the distractions. But if you get your marketing right and don’t slack on it, your business will stay afloat through the turbulence.

So, in your budgeting, ensure that a sizeable amount goes into marketing, especially in the online space.

Keep in mind that during an economically turbulent time, you will need to be sensitive to the situation and make sure that what you are marketing offers real value in the current context.

Focus on the Most Marketable Products or Services

When it comes to business, there are core products or services that may do better than others. During an economic downtime, take your focus away from trying new ventures and taking big risks. We know businesses ought to take risks and try out new ventures, but an economic downtime is the wrongest time to try this out.

In a time like that, you want to scale back and focus on products and services that are most marketable and you’re sure will perform best. It is business suicide to throw funds on weaker services or products in an economic downtime.

You can try to diversify income by creating different versions of the same thing to cater to different target markets like maybe a Premium version, or an economy version, or both.

Put More Energy into Your Existing Customers

When it comes to protecting your small scale business from getting too affected by an economy, one thing that should be at the top of your priority is putting most of your energy into maintaining your existing customers.

This is something you should keep going even in the good times. It is much more difficult to persuade a new customer to make a purchase from you because in an economic downtime, everyone is trying to not spend so much. It is much easier to convince already existing customers to buy again.

Show existing customers that you care, have their back, show them how valuable they are. If you succeed at this, you will most likely build a relationship with your customer that will lead to lifelong customer loyalty.

Which of these will you be focusing on for your small scale business?

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